Coronavirus Part 3

Well, it's been two months since my last coronavirus post. I thought I'd write about my current thoughts on the situation.

In mid-may things started reopening in California. First non-essential retail followed by beaches, dine-in restaurants and - just last weekend -  bars. It didn't make much sense to me, since I look at our case counts daily for San Diego County and our new cases numbers never really went down. Instead it just was a pretty straight line increase. But perhaps we did enough during the lockdown to prevent the curve from turning exponential, so they thought it was safe to reopen. In the past week the number of cases have started to increase here, but are still relatively low compared to other big cities.

Even though much most things are reopen, we've still playing it safe. We haven't been out to the beach, or gone out to eat. We limit our trips to the store and our contact with others. But like most people, we've relaxed a bit from what we were doing in April. We've had my sister visit from LA twice and have been a bit more willing to go outside the house. As I see the number of cases grow here, I'm glad I've been a bit skeptical of the governments rush to reopen things.

For us it continues to be good family time. I've been working from home for 3 months now and it's been terrific. All of our trips have been cancelled, so we took a little mini-vacation out to our friend's vacation house in the desert just to get away from San Diego for a few days. After three months of being confined to the house it was really nice, and now that we're back we've decided to do a home improvement project to help us get the most out of our house since we're spending a lot more time here. I'm planning to build some shade structures in the back yard to replace the umbrellas we have back there. It will be a fun project and give me something to do. We typically do one big house project each year, and this is something we've talked about doing since we've moved in 4 years ago. So I'm excited about that.

I think mentally most people are over COVID-19. But the way things are going right now, I don't see this going away anytime soon. As people start going back out to restaurants & bars I have a feeling that the worst is ahead of us. But hopefully if that comes we'll be more prepared to deal with it, and not writing it off because they've been fatigued from 3 months of restrictions. 

I really have trouble with the people saying that they can't be expected to continue following lockdown orders after so long or who are unwilling to wear a facemask in public. These things are so modest, and have been for such a short amount of time compared to the sacrifices Americans were asked to make during WWII. During WWII the government rationed food, gas and clothes along with increasing taxes and implementing wage controls - all without barely any protest. What people are being asked to now do by comparison seems so minimal, and yet there was so much public pressure after only 8 weeks to eliminate even those restrictions. Its hard for me not to compare the American public's willingness to win WWII to their willingness to beat COVID-19. It seems like there are plenty of people out there who just don't care that much about preventing the spread of COVID-19.